


Found my feet but lost my ground

by halfeatenmoon



Category: Tomorrow Series - John Marsden
Genre: Fic Exchange, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-26
Updated: 2010-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-14 02:57:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/144592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfeatenmoon/pseuds/halfeatenmoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ellie always talks about how much Wirrawee changed after the war.  Homer is spooked by how normal it seems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Found my feet but lost my ground

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lauren (notalwaysweak)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/gifts).



> I haven't read 'While I Live' or any of the other books that come after 'The Other Side of Dawn', so this might not be so canon-compliant. I'm a bit fuzzy on some of the canon I HAVE read because my book collection is incomplete, otherwise I'd have tried to write something set during the war, but I wanted to focus on Hell and this is just what worked for me.
> 
> Title taken from the lyrics to 'Tomorrow' by Nic Cester, partly because they're appropriate but mostly because I'm lazy.

Life was pretty different for Homer after the war, but sometimes it shocked him how normal it was, too. He was back with his parents. Back on the farm, doing almost what he always did. He had Fi, even if things were a bit weird between them. Ellie talked about how drastically everything had changed, but when Homer was at home or at school or out at work on the farm, he could almost forget that the phone line didn’t work most of the time or that there was a national border a few clicks away when there used to just be bush.

That was the problem. It all looked too _safe_. He’d like to believe that the world he lived in now was safe, but they’d all made that mistake already. Nobody else seemed to remember it.

Maybe that was why he lied to his parents when he took off for the weekend. They would have told him not to head out to Hell again. Anyone would. It was too close to the border. He could run into anyone out there. It wasn’t _safe_. He couldn’t explain to them that Hell was the safest place in Australia. Nobody else could find him there, and nothing could make him forget.

He was halfway down the descent when he saw the smoke and realised that he was wrong on both counts. Someone else had gotten in, and not someone friendly – Ellie and Gavin were the only ones left in town who knew the way, and he’d seen them both when he passed Ellie’s house on the way up. What was worse, Homer realised, when he froze at the sight, was that he’d gotten slack. He couldn’t remember taking much care on the way down. He had no idea how visible he’d been, how much noise he made. Whoever was there must have known he was coming.

The sensible thing would have been to go back up, but all Homer did was make sure he had his rifle by his side and keep going, this time at half the volume. It was stupid, really, going in alone when nobody knew where he was or how to help him. But he’d come here for a reason, and now he had it. Hell was _theirs_ , damn it, and if he couldn’t keep his country, the least he could do was defend this one little bit of sanity he had left.

The rest of the descent was painstaking, always on edge, ears pricked for the slightest sound of human life. But the bush, which had often seemed so quiet, was deafeningly loud today. By the time he had the fire in sight – in their old campsite, no less, how fucking dare they – he was just about ready to snap. At least there were some lessons he hadn’t forgotten. When he heard the quiet gasp from somewhere above him as he stepped to the edge of the treeline, he dropped to the ground with his finger on the trigger and the rifle aimed squarely at Lee, who was halfway up a tree looking petrified.

“Jesus,” Homer said, when he remembered to breathe. “You scared me, Lee.”

“You scared me,” Lee replied. “I thought you were a soldier.”

“I thought _you_ were a soldier.”

“Good thing we got that sorted out.”

It still took Homer a minute before he could put the gun down.

“I thought you were in Melbourne,” Homer said, when Lee came down from the tree and they’d calmed down enough to sit by the river.

“I was. I am. I mean, I just wanted to come home for the weekend.”

“Without telling anyone?”

Lee shrugged. “How many people know you’re here?”

Homer took the point. “Melbourne’s good, though, yeah?”

“I guess. It’s changed too, I guess, but I didn’t really know what it was like before, so it’s not like I can tell.”

“Must be a life of luxury compared to Wirrawee.” Homer started chucking rocks in the water.

“I guess. The phones work more than once a week, so that’s nice.”

Once, Homer would have taken that as a cue to harangue him for never calling. Instead he just said, “Living in the lap of luxury, and you spend your weekend in Hell.”

“You know what it’s like,” he said, with an uncomfortable shrug. “It’s good out there. It’s a life. It’s more than I could have asked for. It’s just not…”

“Real,” Homer muttered.

“Yeah.” He looked up, at the scraggly canopy of trees, the dusty green leaves. Not a sound to be heard but mosquitos and running water, nothing in the blinding blue sky but the odd hawk. “I have to come back here sometimes, or I forget it. Hell is real.”


End file.
